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LiveLink™ for PTC® Pro/ENGINEER®

LiveLink™ for PTC® Pro/ENGINEER®

CORROSION MITIGATION: Simulation of impressed current cathodic protection on a ship hull. Results show electrolyte potential for a ship hull with a coated propeller.

Maximize Productivity with Multiphysics Simulation and 3D CAD Design

LiveLink™ for PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® provides the capability to integrate 3D CAD design with multiphysics simulation to update your workflow and boost productivity. PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® is a versatile CAD solution that enables engineers to create parametric solid models of their product designs. In combination with COMSOL Multiphysics®, you have the ability to create your design in Pro/ENGINEER and then simulate your design in the COMSOL environment.

Creating a COMSOL model geometry from your CAD design is straightforward and allows you to evaluate the performance of your product design in the intended operating environment. Essentially any relevant physical effects and their interactions can be included in a COMSOL model to produce accurate simulations of your design. LiveLink™ for PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® includes features for CAD geometry repair, bidirectional model updates, and direct CAD parameter access from within the COMSOL environment to facilitate the integration of multiphysics simulation into your design process.

Convenient File Handling Options

Importing your 3D CAD file is another way to create a COMSOL model geometry from your design. The file import functionality included with LiveLink™ for PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® is derived from the CAD Import Module and supports the import of the widely used ACIS®, Parasolid®, STEP, and IGES formats in addition to the SOLIDWORKS®, Inventor®, PTC® Pro/ENGINEER®, and PTC® Creo® Parametric™ formats. Optional support for the CATIA® V5 file format is also available. By default, the imported CAD design is represented as a Parasolid geometry in COMSOL Multiphysics that can be further modified or updated. For example, you can combine imported geometry with geometry drawn in the COMSOL environment, and you have several possibilities for partitioning the geometry objects to create additional computational domains. This can be useful if you want to extend the simulation to the regions surrounding the imported solid objects of a CAD design. File export from COMSOL Multiphysics in the ACIS and Parasolid formats allows you to share your geometry and exchange data with other CAD programs and viewers.

LiveLink™ for PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® provides a bidirectional interface between your designs in Pro/ENGINEER and the corresponding COMSOL model geometry. Direct synchronization ensures that design updates propagate in both COMSOL Multiphysics and Pro/ENGINEER while preserving geometry associations. Geometric entities, such as edges and faces, in the COMSOL model geometry remain associated with the corresponding features in your CAD design so that physics definitions and mesh settings are preserved throughout the revision process. You can manually synchronize the design geometry between Pro/ENGINEER and the COMSOL environment when running both programs concurrently. Synchronization is automatic with parametric sweeps, or when running optimization studies using the optional Optimization Module.

CAD parameters in Pro/ENGINEER, such as the placement or length of a feature, can be directly accessed and modified by COMSOL Multiphysics. Optimization studies and parametric sweeps can be implemented in the COMSOL environment with recurrent access to CAD design parameters. When an optimization goal is achieved by varying the value of a parameter used for simulation, the final optimized value can be written back to the CAD file.

Geometry Repair Process Ensures Efficient Simulations

LiveLink™ for PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® includes tools to prepare your CAD geometry for meshing and analysis. The detection, removal, and repair of geometric anomalies is automatic when you import a design from a CAD file into COMSOL Multiphysics for simulation. Predefined tolerances are used as criteria for the removal and repair process. Small features remaining in a geometry after import can be removed at your discretion to reduce the complexity of the mesh required to simulate your design. The defeaturing tools in this LiveLink™ product can detect features such as small edges, faces, slivers, and fillets that will make your simulations less efficient. Features can be removed from the geometry using the defeaturing tools in COMSOL Multiphysics, or they can be deactivated in Pro/ENGINEER where you have access to the history of the CAD design.

Instead of removing geometric features directly from your design, you can use virtual geometry operations to omit them from your simulations in COMSOL Multiphysics. Virtual geometries are beneficial because they preserve the original surface curvature of your design while reducing the complexity of the mesh for simulation. You create a virtual geometry by selecting features you do not want meshed and included in your simulation. Using this feature enables you to reduce the required computational resources and make your simulations more efficient.

PTC and Pro/ENGINEER are registered trademarks of PTC Inc. or its subsidiaries in the USA and in other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. For a list of such trademark owners, see http://www.comsol.com/tm. COMSOL AB and its subsidiaries and products are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or supported by these trademark owners.

LiveLink™ for PTC® Pro/ENGINEER®

Product Features

A LiveLink™ interface that synchronizes between the PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® Wildfire® 4.0, Wildfire® 5.0, or PTC® Creo® Elements Pro 5.0 versions of the CAD software and COMSOL Multiphysics® when both are running simultaneously

The synchronized geometry is associative, i.e., the CAD model can be modified in PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® without the need to re-apply model settings in COMSOL Multiphysics® after re-synchronization

Automatically generate selections on the synchronized geometry in the COMSOL® model from the material assignments in the PTC® Pro/ENGINEER®parts and assemblies.

File import of the most popular CAD file formats, see table below

Encapsulate geometries to model phenomena in the surrounding domains

Export geometry files to the Parasolid® and ACIS® file formats

Geometry repair through identification of geometric inconsistencies and knitting surfaces to create solids

Synchronize parameters between the PTC® Pro/ENGINEER® design and COMSOL Multiphysics® model to modify the COMSOL Multiphysics® geometry, either manually or as controlled by a parametric or optimization solver

Defeaturing through the finding and deletion of fillets, short edges, sliver faces, small faces, and spikes

Manually deleting faces and healing the resulting gaps through filling (creating a new face) or patching (shrinking or expanding adjacent faces)

Detaching faces from a solid object to create a new solid object

Cap holes or empty spaces to fill the space and create modeling domains

Patch removed faces by growing or shrinking the surrounding surfaces to cover the removed face

Supported File Formats

Note that not all file formats are supported on all operative systems, for details see System Requirements

LiveLink™ for PTC® Pro/ENGINEER®

To ensure astronaut safety on space missions, it is necessary to routinely revitalize the atmosphere in manned spacecraft. Jim Knox, Rob Coker, and a team of engineers at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center have developed a water-saving system called an Isothermal Bulk Dessicant (IBD). The IBD is used to collect water from the atmosphere for re ...

There has been a recent move towards utilizing bulbous bows on ships to house different types of sonar systems, but it is not definite how much structural vibration might interfere with the functioning of a transducer array inside the sonar dome. INSEAN, the National Institute for Studies and Experiments of Naval Architecture in Italy, needed a ...

To ensure astronaut safety on space missions, it is necessary to routinely revitalize the atmosphere in manned spacecraft. Jim Knox, Rob Coker, and a team of engineers at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center have developed a water-saving system called an Isothermal Bulk Dessicant (IBD). The IBD is used to collect water from the atmosphere for re ...

There has been a recent move towards utilizing bulbous bows on ships to house different types of sonar systems, but it is not definite how much structural vibration might interfere with the functioning of a transducer array inside the sonar dome. INSEAN, the National Institute for Studies and Experiments of Naval Architecture in Italy, needed a ...

LiveLink™ for PTC® Pro/ENGINEER®

Geometric Parameter Optimization of a Tuning Fork

This model computes the fundamental eigenfrequency and eigenmode for a tuning fork that is synchronized from Pro/ENGINEER via the LiveLink interface. The length of the fork is then optimized so that the tuning fork sounds the note A, 440 Hz.

This model computes the fundamental eigenfrequency and eigenmode for a tuning fork that is synchronized from Pro/ENGINEER via the LiveLink interface. The length of the fork is then optimized so that the tuning fork sounds the note A, 440 Hz.

Next Step:Request a SoftwareDemonstration

Every business and every simulation need is different. In order to fully evaluate whether or not the COMSOL Multiphysics® software will meet your requirements, you need to contact us. By talking to one of our sales representatives, you will get personalized recommendations and fully documented examples to help you get the most out of your evaluation and guide you to choose the best license option to suit your needs.

Just click on the "Contact COMSOL" button, fill in your contact details and any specific comments or questions, and submit. You will receive a response from a sales representative within one business day.